Mayor Giuliani's Policing Strategy; Drug Busts by Beat Cops

Published: April 8, 1994

Rudolph Giuliani campaigned for mayor on a promise to fight crime and disorder with a zeal that would reassure worried New Yorkers. Mayor Giuliani's new plans for increasing drug arrests and cracking down on teen-age truants are clearly an attempt to make good on that promise.

The plans are reasonable and deserve a chance to be put to the test. But the new drug approach could also encourage police corruption and violations of civil liberties unless it is very carefully administered and monitored.

Under the new drug plan, the Police Department will create drug and gun teams that will conduct buy-and-bust operations. But the major change is the use of uniformed patrol officers in the war against dealers. Patrol officers will make arrests in drug-ridden areas and prevent drug dealers from returning once they have been driven away.

This could work better than the old Tactical Narcotics Teams, which swept neighborhoods clean of drug dealers only to find that the dealers returned almost immediately when the T.N.T. moved on. Unlike the T.N.T. teams, the narcotics and gun teams will undertake longer investigations against both gun and drug dealers. The administration was wise to recognize that sweeps are meaningless without a continued police presence afterward.

The strength of the new plan -- and its greatest potential weakness -- is that it involves uniformed patrol officers far more deeply in the drug investigations and arrests. Since the corruption scandals uncovered by the Knapp commission in the 1970's, those activities have been left primarily to specialized citywide units lest the beat cops fall prey to bribes. But what is to stop corruption from returning under the new plan? Recent cases of officers shaking down drug dealers and selling the drugs and guns give ample reason for concern. The police need to step up internal surveillance to head off the problem.

Placing uniformed officers at the heart of drug investigations could also lead to clogged courts and weak cases. The strongest drug cases are in "buys and busts," where undercover cops buy the drugs, then arrest the dealers. The dealers have elaborate systems of scouts and couriers that can often keep uniformed officers well away from the transactions. Shaky cases against defendants who have been stopped and frisked without probable cause might pack the courts -- with little or no effect on the drug trade.

Mr. Giuliani and Police Commissioner William Bratton are right to move zealously against the drug trade. Both must take care not to provoke an air of cowboyism in which inexperienced officers would violate the law in the name of enforcing it, or succumb to corruption. What New York needs is steady, smart policing.